Elegy to the Last Face: The Photograph of the Death Mask of Erich Sander

Abstract

Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) is the vast photographic project that August Sander developed, not without dramatic obstacles, over four decades. The photograph that ends this extraordinary archive is that of the death mask of his eldest son, Erich. The decision of this German photographer opens a series of different questions that provokes a reflection on the author‘s gaze and his relationship with the subject, the historical content and the political weight of the image, its composition, its documentary and indexical value, its questionable objectivity, and its place in the context of coetaneous photography and its symbolic function in the artist‘s work.